Russian channel taken off air, accused of crossing 'red line'

Late
last month, as thousands of international journalists prepared to descend on
Sochi to cover the Winter Olympics, the Kremlin resorted to using a controversy
to silence a critical television station. A direct move to shut down the
station would have been too blunt--particularly at a time when all eyes were on
Russia--so authorities resorted to exploiting a producer's blunder, blowing it
out of proportion, and pushing a third party to do their bidding. This is what
happened.

On
January 26, the independent television channel Dozhd (Rain) ran a poll on its
website pegged to the 70-year anniversary of the end of the 900-day-siege of
Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) by Nazi Germany during World War II. The poll
asked whether the Soviet Union should have surrendered the city to save the
hundreds of thousands of lives that were lost in the siege, mostly because of starvation.
The question could not be more sensitive in a country that holds the Great
Patriotic War in reverence and where even a hint of criticism of its handling
could be considered a dishonor to the memory of the dead.

The
station quickly pulled the poll off its website and apologized, but it was too
late. The poll had caused a stir, followed by much criticism by various public
officials, including the presidential spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. State Duma
deputies with the ruling United Russia party publicly called for the station's
ban. Peskov, in a January 29 interview with Dozhd itself, said the station had
"crossed a moral-ethical red line" in posing the siege question. The "channel
had crossed all permissible boundaries," he said, and called on the audience not
to tolerate the incident. "Because the moment we start having even the
slightest tolerance to such polls, we will start eroding as a nation, eroding
our memory, the genetic memory of our people," he said.

Peskov's
interview--given, in his words, as a viewer rather than the president's
spokesman--was accompanied by other angry reactions. That same day, members of
the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly approved an appeal to Russian
Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika, calling on him to investigate whether Dozhd had
broken the law by posting such "provocative material," and to take all
necessary measures up to closing the channel, the Russian website Newsru reported. Chaika's office
confirmed that the appeal would be promptly considered, the local press said.

Then,
days after Dozhd ran the controversial poll, Yuri Pripachkin, head of the Cable
Television Association of Russia, which includes both private and state-owned
telecommunication operators in the country, called for pulling the plug on the channel.
The channel's cable and satellite providers began dropping the station from
their service packages.

Dozhd
started as an online television channel in 2010, and in the following three
years gained cable and satellite operations. As of January 25, the channel
reached a total of 17.7 million homes and 4 million users online, Mikhail
Zygar, the station's editor-in-chief, told CPJ. But today, only small regional
providers are carrying the channel, he said. The channel's scope has dropped from
reaching close to 18 million Russian homes to reaching only about 2 million
homes, Zygar told CPJ.

Pripachkin,
a former Soviet army captain turned businessman, may
have personally been insulted by the Dozhd poll, but the decision of a dozen major
operators to pull the plug on Dozhd smacks of a political order beyond
Pripachkin's purview. When the presidential spokesman publicly calls for
intolerance to Dozhd's alleged misbehavior, and when he invokes such sensitivities
as the people's "genetic memory" of World War II, he gives a de facto order to
the relevant parties to act against the channel. In addition, reports said,
cable providers had received daily phone calls from top Kremlin officials in
the immediate aftermath of the Dozhd poll, pressing providers to withdraw
services from the station.

According
to Natalya Sindeyeva, Dozhd's co-owner and general director, the poll was a
pretext to destroy the station. Sindeyeva said on the air on January 29 that she
believed the campaign to bring Dozhd to its knees was planned ahead of the poll
and that it was in retaliationfor the station's critical reporting, including its
coverage in November 2013 of an investigation by the popular anti-corruption
blogger Aleksei Navalny about luxurious summer homes in the Moscow region,
belonging to high-ranking government officials, whose cost many times exceeded
the officials' declared income.

In
its three years of existence, Dozhd has provided an alternative to
Kremlin-controlled federal television channels by giving a platform to
opposition voices and focusing on news content. And its reach and impact have grown.
As leading Russian media analyst Masha Lipman
wrote
on The New Yorker's blog in early February, "The
channel's reportage on politically sensitive issues--the Moscow street protests
in 2011 and 2012; the mass unrest in Ukraine--has been dramatically different
from the official coverage by Russia's national television giants."

"From
the very start, our main audience has consisted of people who had stopped
watching television," Zygar told CPJ. "And this has been our motto: 'Give
television one more chance! Do not be afraid to turn on your television set!'
To an extent, we have succeeded in achieving that goal. We have often heard
from viewers such comments as 'I only bought a TV set because of your
channel.'"

On
Tuesday, Russia's media
regulator Roskomnadzor said in response to a query by Russia's presidential
human rights council,
that cable and satellite operators had not violated the law or infringed on
consumer rights when they dropped Dozhd from their packages, according to the
English-language daily Moscow Times. Meanwhile,
millions of Russians are being deprived of access to their preferred source of
news and information.

Nina Ognianova is coordinator of CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia Program. A native of Bulgaria, Ognianova has led CPJ advocacy missions to Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan.